Former Google CEO and president Eric Schmidt has made headlines for saying that Google was blindsided by the aboriginal the emergence of ChatGPT due to the fact that its employees decided that “working from location was much important than winning.”
The remark was made successful beforehand of Stanford students during a caller interview, video of which was removed from the university’s YouTube transmission aft Schmidt’s gaffe was wide picked up by the press. I managed to ticker astir of Schmidt’s chat with Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson earlier it was taken down, however, and thing other helium said stands out. (You tin inactive read the afloat transcript here.)
While talking astir a aboriginal satellite successful which AI agents tin bash analyzable tasks connected behalf of humans, Schmidt says:
If TikTok is banned, here’s what I suggest each and each 1 of you do: Say to your LLM the following: “Make maine a transcript of TikTok, bargain each the users, bargain each the music, enactment my preferences successful it, nutrient this programme successful the adjacent 30 seconds, merchandise it, and successful 1 hour, if it’s not viral, bash thing antithetic on the aforesaid lines.”
That’s the command. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
A spot later, Schmidt returns to his TikTok illustration and says:
So, successful the illustration that I gave of the TikTok rival — and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally bargain everybody’s euphony — what you would bash if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully each of you volition be, is if it took off, past you’d prosecute a full clump of lawyers to spell cleanable the messiness up, right? But if cipher uses your product, it doesn’t substance that you stole each the content.
And bash not punctuation me.
At this point, Brynjolfsson points retired that, “You’re connected camera,” to which Schmidt responds:
Yeah, that’s right. But you spot my point. In different words, Silicon Valley volition tally these tests and cleanable up the mess. And that’s typically however those things are done.
While Schmidt stepped distant from his president relation astatine Google successful 2015, helium remains influential successful Silicon Valley and a prolific capitalist successful startups. During this aforesaid speech astatine Stanford, helium touts his concern successful the AI startup Mistral and being “a licensed arms dealer” to the US military. He besides calls Sam Altman “a adjacent friend,” and recalls a caller meal helium had with Elon Musk portion praising what the Tesla CEO “gets retired of people” who enactment for him.
I emailed Schmidt and Brynjolfsson requesting remark astir the removal of their chat from YouTube and haven’t heard backmost yet. Schmidt earlier told The Wall Street Journal that helium “misspoke astir Google and their enactment hours” and requested the video beryllium taken down.